A toponímia indígena em Mato Grosso do sul: um estudo etnolinguístico

Abstract

This thesis has as its object of investigation the rural indigenous toponymy of the state of Mato Grosso do Sul and conceives the toponym, in its essence, as a linguistic sign, discussing its relation with the culture and the social history of the man who inhabits and/or inhabited the named space. The research corpus gathers 1,750 toponyms that name rural physical accidents belonging to the 79 municipalities in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, most of them extracted from the computerized data system of the Toponymy Atlas of the State of Mato Grosso do Sul (ATEMS), updated by consulting the maps of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE/2010). The research is guided by the following objectives: to investigate the indigenous influence in the naming process of geographical accidents in the studied space; to evidence the Amerindian vocabular contribution to the lexicon of the Portuguese language and to demonstrate that indigenous-based toponyms are an integral part of the linguistic-cultural identity of the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. As a first research hypothesis we considered the fact that indigenous-based toponyms were influenced by socio-historical-cultural particularities and preserved in the geographic nomenclature of the state, privileging elements of the surrounding nature, such as flora, fauna, water, and soil. In the search for an answer to the second hypothesis, it was found that the analyzed indigenous toponyms, especially those with a complex structure, show an orthographic ‘welding’ process, which extends Dick (1992) proposal for the morphological formation of toponyms with the discussion of this new process of generating compound names. The data analysis was guided, fundamentally, by the theoretical and methodological orientations proposed by Longnon (1920); Dauzat (1947); Drumond (1965) and Dick (1982; 1987; 1990; 1992; 1997; 2000; 2006; 2008). The etymological description and the consequent analysis of the language of origin of the toponyms were supported by works on indigenous languages, such as Rodrigues (1951; 1993; 1996; 1999; 2002); Edelweiss (1958; 1969); Gregório (1980) and Seki (1999; 2000), including, in particular, dictionaries of indigenous languages, such as Sampaio (1928); Barbosa (1956); Tibiriçá (1985; 1989); Cunha (1998; 1999); Navarro (2005; 2013); Assis (2008); Guasch; Ortiz (2008) and Stradelli (2014). Regarding motivation, the data confirm that taxonomies of a physical nature, with 81.37%, prevail over those of an anthropocultural nature, with 13.60% (5.03% of the toponyms await etymological description to support the classification). These data show that the indigenous influence is more intense in toponyms of a physical nature, precisely because they relate to the environment whose naming is part of the lexical universe of the denominator, especially those motivated by the presence of plants, animals and water. The result of this study showed a higher incidence of toponyms of indigenous origin in the southwest mesoregion and the micro-region of Iguatemi, areas that hold significant contingents of indigenous populations: 46.00% and 23.08% of the analyzed corpus, respectively. With regard to taxonomic categories, three taxes with the highest productivity index were identified in the corpus: phytotoponyms (37.37%); zootoponyms (24.97%) and hydrotoponyms (11.60%), all of a physical nature. As for the morphological structure, the toponyms composed by juxtaposition (32.28%) and by agglutination (27.60%) had the highest productivity, while the simple structure toponyms ranked third (16.57%), and the hybrid and simple hybrid compounds (10.40% and 5.31%) ranked fourth and fifth, respectively. Regarding the language of origin, the results confirm that indigenous toponymy has a strong influence in the toponymy of the state, which was attributed, especially, to socio-environmental conditioning factors in the nomination process and the concentration of indigenous people, especially Tupi, with 59.65% of occurrences and Guarani with 5.65%.Among the hybrid toponyms, two categories stood out: the composition Tupi + LP (10.91% of the cases) and LP + Tupi (8.34% of the occurrences), indicating the indigenous contribution to the Portuguese language léxicon. In summary, the results of the research confirm the strong influence of social history in the toponymic lexicon, the importance of toponymic research to rescue linguistic, cultural and ideological aspects of a community of speakers and the role of indigenous toponymy as an important immaterial asset for the environmental, cultural and linguistic heritage of a community of speakers.

Key-words: Onomastics; Toponymy; Indigenous Languages; Ethnolinguistics; Morphology; ATEMS.